Month: October 2015

Key Ideas: For the past three weeks, we have been working on creating the tension in the scene. Tension is quite similar to pressure, but pressure is kind of used in bad meanings. However, tension is extremely crucial in order to make the scene more exciting and enjoyable, and also grabs attention of the audience. There are two categories of tension, which are expected surprise tension, and unexpected surprise tension. The example of expected surprise tension is that when one man is diving in the sea and there is a big shark following him. While watching this scene, most of the audience would think that he’ll get eaten by the shark. On the other hand, the example of unexpected tension surprise is that when there’s one man diving in the ocean, and suddenly there’s a shark swimming like a bullet and catches him in less than second. I think that all of the audiences wouldn’t predict nor think that the shark would appear and eat the man. We also studied the tension in relationships, such as ceremony, funeral, argument, accident, and discussions.

Approach: For activities, we did an activity called “The Wholly Hat”. I had a lot of fun. The game creates heavy tension between the leader, brothers and sisters. Since the leader has higher position than brothers and sisters sitting in a circle, the leader demands them to do something perfectly even though it’s extremely challenging. The heavy tension is created, by the strict mood, since brothers and sisters had to ask the leader to do something (to stand up, and to speak). Also, there’s unexpected surprise tension, since all brothers and sisters do not know when the leader talks you to do something. We also need to concentrate a lot while playing this game, since we had to do thing that the leader asked me perfectly, and I think that this is crucial, to create a heavy tension and to make it realistic.

For our summative task, we had to create a act that is either ceremony, or ritual. Our scene took place in spaceship in the future, and while we were traveling to the Mars, there was a meteor coming towards our spaceship, and two pilots are doing their best to prevent from the collision, and there is a conflict between a man who thinks everything will be fine, and a mother who is trying her best to ease her daughter. In this scene, both surprises (expected, unexpected) are included, since you won’t know that there’ll be meteor coming towards us, and that the razor gun does not work.

Outcomes: While we were playing the wholly hat, we got distracted by laughing, to decrease the tension. In this game, both surprised tensions are being used, so there is extremely high tension in the room, since all the brothers and sisters are expecting what will happen next. There was quite a strange mood in the room, since everyone was quiet, because we were not allowed to talk.

For the performance, overall, I think this went well. There was no confusion during the play, and no one forgot their script, and we successfully made the tension, because of the great effort of the pilots, and the argument between the man and the mother. However, I think the only problem was that there were too much talking, so maybe it was hard for the audience to catch up with listening and understanding the situation, since there were too much talking. So, next time we would like to make play with less talking (than ours), and we should include the communication with the body language, and also the facial expression.

Connection: Tension is extremely important in order to make the play or story interesting and exciting. However, the drama is so much easier since we can all create the tension by our facial expression, language, and behavior, while in books we have to create the tension by using the language, which is harder. So, next time, I would really like to learn how to create a tension in a story writing, to make my writing even more interesting.

I think that we did well in our performance, and also I am quite satisfied with the way I acted, since I was a bit nervous whether I can perform in front of many people.